RFC Weekly - 4th April 2016

Xamarin

As anticipated, Microsoft have announced that Xamarin will be free with Visual Studio (even community edition).

Xamarin provides a framework for multi-device (think multi-phone) apps.

Microsoft Bot Framework

Interesting new framework for intelligent bots. So interesting for self service

Free Code Camp

Amazing site which is providing a really great opportunity for anyone to learn how to code. It's all free. It's all self paced. It's aimed to giving practical coding & team experience to anyone looking to learn to code. I heard a podcast from the founder and found it incredibly inspirational. Quincy talks about the motivation behind the site and why he founded it.

I've been interested in how we teach coding for sometime now. With a combination of a skills shortage and so many people struggling to get started in a career, then initiatives like this are superb - really looking forward to seeing how it progresses.

In the same vein, this article is a nice little introduction to new (and some experienced) developers.

Lavish Bootstrap

Fun little site which creates a Bootstrap colour theme from any photo you provide. Lots of fun.

Shameless self-promotion

Two articles again this week;

Third in the series of converting my www.red-folder.com website over to ASP.Net Core & MVC 6. Spoiler alert -> I spend a lot of it fixing a mistake I made in the second article. All ends well with getting the site into Azure. You can read it here

Within my ROI series on LinkedIn, I've taken a look at Flow & Productivity. This article can be found here.

About the author:

Mark Taylor is an experience IT Consultant passionate about helping his clients get better ROI from their Software Development.

He has over 20 years Software Development experience - over 15 of those leading teams. He has experience in a wide variety of technologies and holds certification in Microsoft Development and Scrum.

He operates through Red Folder Consultancy Ltd.